The Antecedent of it???

Question

Guys,
Have a look at the question below-

The price of a bushel of corn has fallen so drastically that some farmers  have found it to be more cost effective to destroy their crops as to make  the effort to get them to market.

A) have found it to be more cost effective to destroy their crops as to make
B) found that the destruction of their crops is more cost effective than making
C) find the destruction of their crops as more cost effective than making
D) find it more cost effective to destroy their crops than to make
E) are finding that the destruction of their crops is more cost effective than the making of

Now I understand that all the choices except D have a grammatical mistake,  but then again what is the antecedent of "it" in choice D ? 
The answer of course is D

VeritasPrepBrian · Answer

Good question, manglam - and I guess the best answer is "be careful which resources you use to study." From Googling this one it doesn't look like it comes from GMAC, which means that it may be testing something that the GMAT won't test.

What D says is akin to me saying "I like it when it rains" or "I love it when you call me Big Poppa" where "it" doesn't modify a particular noun but more a whole idea. Which happens in colloquial English, but isn't something I've seen the GMAT test so I wouldn't be overly concerned with it.

Now, what you said in your post though is really key - the other answers had very clear errors, and D was one you were "stuck with" even though you can't define why it's correct. That will happen! Our Advanced Verbal Strategy book talks all about that - the GMAT will give you a strange-sounding (but correct!) correct answer and you won't love the answer you pick, but it will be the only one that doesn't commit a major error. So the good lesson from this problem is to be prepared to pick answers you don't love, but that you have to live with.

manglam13 · Answer

Thanks for your reply.

I guess you have to choose the lesser of the two evils, but then again the question remains - which is the bigger evil?
For example, one could easily use the criteria of no antecedent to eliminate answer choices!

VeritasPrepBrian · Answer

Really good point on "which is the lesser of two evils" and that's where I'm a little skeptical of this particular example. If this were a test only given to those who have spoken English in the US since birth it may not be a bad question at all, but for a test where 2/3 of exams are taken outside the US I just don't think they'd use D as a correct answer (and I've never seen them use pronouns that way).

For the larger lesson here, it's not really "which is the lesser of two evils" where evil means "incorrect" - it's "which one do I KNOW to be wrong and which one might actually be right". This video may help:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_kxRKjqD4E  Essentially the GMAT will often use "correct but not as common" idiomatic phrasings or sentence structures as the bait to get you to eliminate based on that, and in doing so take your eyes off of an absolutely-wrong verb tense or pronoun or parallelism error. So when you're thinking "lesser of two evils" you're really thinking about which one you know to definitively be wrong/illogical vs. which one is "I'd never write it that way myself, but I guess I don't know it to be dead wrong."

The Antecedent of it???

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